I wanted to share a story about why I'm so excited about messaging.
It's 2009, and I've been at Best Buy 7 years since selling Geek Squad to them. I'm sitting in a meeting where some PR firm is pitching their next year's projects for Best Buy. The bid? 3 million. As I was oft to do, I'm on twitter - watching pissed off customers tweet one problem after another. I turned to Best Buy's CMO at the time, Barry Judge and said, "What if our PR strategy was to listen to customers?" That's when we took a small piece of that money and built an in-house twitter tool to allow customers to message customer support. It was similar to a custom version of ZenDesk. The vision was to imagine EVERY employee of a company accessible through real-time chat, use the data to predict problems before they occur, and empower employees to help. The most people we were able to get on that system was 5,000 out of 150,000 employees. I left Best Buy in 2012, and sadly there are likely less than 5,000 still using it.
We are excited to try and accelerate 2 things: expose more APIs that allow for customer self-service, like scheduling, pre-ordering, queuing, requests, etc. Further, when you need to talk to a business, that you can do it through a single interface where YOU have a copy of the conversation "for quality purposes".
We all have a long way to go, but I hope you can see what kinds of service could be delivered in the coming months and years.
Very impressed with the smooth Facebook Messenger connection. It just works, no installation required.
I've never seen a bot working inside Facebook Messenger - is this an official connection, or are they going to shut you down when the word is out? Very interesting!
Can you share more info on this?
@mmariansky can't really say much but I think it's obvious where all this is going. I started Geek Squad as soon as I saw the web in college. I haven't been as excited until now in hopes of using messaging versus voice for customer service.
This is so cool. Not sure if you guys can answer this yet publicly, but I'll throw the question out: what type of AI are you using? Did you build your own using deep learning algos , or is this a machine learning/Watson type set-up, or are you just licensing some other AI? How much of the guts can you tell us about?
@tuckermax As bots become more and more common, machine learning and technologies like recurrent neural nets will be the key to expanding capability through messaging and text interfaces. There is a lot of very new open source code being released by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and others. This is one of the keys how we plan to improve @Assist.
I also think it is no accident that Mark Zuckerberg chose to build his own "Jarvis" for home automation - which will use text and voice control. Think of the message this sends to all Facebook engineers, especially the Messenger and WhatsApp teams.
@tuckermax Thanks brother and thanks for being in my camp for the past year. Much appreciated for all your thoughts and support. I don't care what people say, you ain't too bad of a guy.
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